Last night, Simon put a hotfix live to address some of the outstanding issues with the food-prep stations.

I did another video of a play-through and still encountered some unexpected deaths.
My problem is that the save file doesn't recreate those deaths.

I had my suspicions that colonist Y. Jenkins was going to die. So I saved (Save2).

There were two food prep stations. One was empty. The other had 19k of prepared food. Mr Jenkins ignored the available food repeatedly and eventually died.
(in fact, all colonists were seemingly ignoring that available food during my initial play through).
btw, were they supposed to eat the chickens? Because there were plenty of those too.

But when I loaded the save this morning, other colonists and Mr Jenkins all were able to use that food station. Avoiding the immediate deaths.
... They still died anyway, because I didn't have enough food available yet to refill the food stations.

My best guess is that last night, other colonists were are flagged to use the food prep station - so the ones I cared about were bypassing it.
Or something with interaction points. Or something more subtle. Let's be honest, I've no clue.